e-Service - 22 August 2021

 Mexborough Baptist Church     Sunday 22nd August 2021   

Call to Worship  

Family of God: welcome!  
Welcome to this place of love and grace,  
Welcome to this place of hope and perseverance.  
God invites all of us to be a part of the beloved community,  
God invites all of us to share in the good news:  
We are welcome, just as we are. We are loved, just as we are.  
In gratitude for all of this, let us worship God and sing together 'Praise To The Lord, The Almighty, The King Of Creation' followed by 'King Of Kings, Majesty.'  click on the links  

Prayer  

King of Kings, Majesty, we love to sing praises to you. We rejoice in you, our maker. We exalt you, our King. We praise your name, for you delight in your people. We do not deserve to come into the presence of the Holy God of the Universe but you have crowned the humble with victory, you have lifted up those who are bowed down, you have clothed us in your righteousness. We come before you with confidence, not based on ourselves, but based on your love. Let your praises be in our hearts and on our lips.  Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.  

Dates for your diary  

Denise is taking some annual leave, and there won't be an email service or EXTRA next weekend.  Next Sunday Trevor and Lisa will be leading an all-age worship service.   

Sunday 5th September there will be a thanksgiving and dedication service for Luna Rae Thorpe.  

Sunday 12th September - communion service which will include a commissioning of Lisa and the team for Mustard Seeds which starts on Monday 13th September.  Lisa and the team would appreciate your prayers.  

Sunday 19th September - all-age Harvest service.  Please bring a harvest gift for this service.  

Sunday 26th September - Chris Whiteley (Old Baptist Union) will be the speaker.  

Sunday 10th October - Vision and Strategy morning with Clive Burnard.  It is important that everybody - church member, regular attender, occasional attender, recipient of the email services and Extras - thinks through the questions below so that together we can all discover God's plans for our church.  The questions are not about us as individuals but about Mexborough Baptist Church - what are the church's strengths, what is the church good at, etc.  

While it is good and necessary to seek the Lord for His plans for our church, it is even better to seek Him for Himself.  Our next song helps us to do that - 'As the Deer Pants for the Water'  click on the link   

Thank you to Paul for his reflections on his chosen psalm...  

The book of Psalms has been called the hymnbook of the Jewish people and many of the Psalms have found their way into our hymnbooks.  But there’s only one psalm that I can think of that became a hit single, one of the top 10 best-selling singles of all time in the UK and was No. 1 in the UK pop charts for 5 weeks.  Can you think which Psalm it was?  The year was 1978 and it was a question in one of Brian’s music quizzes in the Extra.  The song was Rivers of Babylon by Boney M  click on the link    

Please read Psalm 137:1-6.  
This is one of the latest psalms, written in the time of the Jewish exile in Babylon.  You can read in the Bible, in the books of Kings and Chronicles and many of the prophets, how the Jewish people had fallen away from God, begun worshipping foreign gods and living decadent, immoral lives.  They ignored all the warnings through the prophets and in 598 BC the threatened disaster finally arrived in the form of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and his army, who laid siege to Jerusalem.  In 597 the Babylonian army conquered Jerusalem and deported many of its people to Babylon.  Those who were left eventually rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar so he came back in 588 BC, conquered Jerusalem again in 587 and deported almost all the rest of the Jewish people to Babylon.   

As you read this psalm you get the sense that it was written in the early months or years of the exile.  There’s a feeling of homesickness in v1, as the exiles sit and weep when they remember Zion, another name for Jerusalem.  Babylon is very much a foreign land v4.  The Babylonians are described as captors and tormentors when they ask the exiles to sing songs of their homeland v3.  And there’s a passive-aggressive response from the exiles as they hang their harps on the poplars v2 and refuse to sing.  After all, they are strangers in a strange land, uprooted from their home and transported to another country with a different language, different culture, different customs.  They are sad and bewildered. How can they possibly sing joyful songs from their homeland?  Have you ever felt like that?  Can you imagine what that is like?  

I’ve had little tastes of it – when I went to university in Birmingham, never having left home before; when I studied in Germany; when Denise and I lived in Sarajevo and visited India.  These were all choices I made and I knew I would be going home again. The Jewish exiles were forcibly removed from their homeland against their will and had little or no hope of ever seeing it again. Add despair to homesickness.  
The Afghan refugees will be feeling like this.  They have had to flee Afghanistan, fearing for their lives and not knowing whether they will ever get back.  We may not meet any of them but, if we do, how are we going to treat them?  Asking them to sing joyful Afghan songs probably isn’t the thing to do to make them feel welcome and safe in a foreign land.  

In Psalm 137:5-6 there is a determination on the part of the Jewish exiles not to forget Jerusalem.  They want to keep their memories and their identity alive.  They don’t want to become Babylonians, they are going to maintain their Jewish culture and religion.  We need the same determination to maintain our Christian identity.  There is so much pressure on us now to submit and conform to the spirit of the times that we’re beginning to feel like strangers in our own land.  And we are – we are citizens of heaven on our way home; we’re not there yet.  

Read Psalm 137:7-9.  Now that’s not in Boney M’s version.  The writer of the song has put in Psalm 19:14 instead “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”  I don’t know why they did that but maybe they were uncomfortable with the rest of Psalm 137.  Homesickness, despair, even a passive-aggressive response to people seen as captors and tormentors are okay emotions but these 3 verses are something else. There’s deep anger here and a vindictiveness that wants revenge, that wants to see the Edomites punished for their attitude and the Babylonians for their actions.  There is even a certainty that Babylon will get its just desserts, that what they did to the Jewish people will be done to them and the person who does it will be happy to do it.  

As Christians, we want our words and thoughts, the meditations of our hearts, to be pleasing to God.  Somehow we feel that words and thoughts that spring from sadness and despair are pleasing to God, while those that come from anger and vengefulness are not.  And maybe that’s right.  But sometimes anger and vengefulness are the emotions that rise in us in the particular situation we find ourselves in and we need to be honest with ourselves and with the Lord about that.  As you read the Bible, whether it’s the stories of the Old Testament or New, Psalms or the prophetic books, the wisdom books of the Old Testament or the letters of the New, you find that the Bible is very honest about us human beings.  It describes us as we are, warts and all.  

Psalm 137 is honest about the emotional state of the Jewish people, newly carried off into exile – homesick, sad, full of despair, angry, vengeful.  It doesn't have a resolution; there’s no insight in the presence of God, the Lord doesn’t speak.  Perhaps, caught up in the deep emotions of that time, the exiles weren’t ready or able to hear the Lord or begin to process how they felt and find a way to live more comfortably with their situation.  There are times when we are the same.  At those times we need to be honest with ourselves and the Lord about how we feel and then we can begin to deal with how we feel and how we go forward in the situation.  The Lord knows exactly what we’re like and loves us anyway.  He doesn’t turn away from us because we’re upset or angry, though he will let us rant and get it off our chest before he leads us into the better way forward and a happier place.  

Our next hymn reminds us that, whatever our situation and however we feel, we can take it all to Jesus in prayer.  We sing together 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus'   click on the link    

Intercessions  

All-loving God, Your hands have fashioned every lovely corner of this treasured planet, and the beautiful land of Afghanistan is as precious as every other place Your children call ‘home'. By its rivers and mountains, its fields and gardens, its busy towns and ancient villages, it is the heart's desire of its people and the place where their lives and loves are nurtured.  
We grieve today with those who grieve over Afghanistan, the people who call it home indeed, the people exiled or suddenly having to leave, and the men and women from other countries who have made sacrifices in recent years in the cause of that country's future.  
We remember with renewed sadness the loss of lives of military personnel during the years of this country's involvement in Afghanistan, conscious of the questions that must today be troubling the minds of those in our community who were bereaved, those who were wounded on operations, and those who were forever changed by experiences suffered there.  
We pray for peace, dignity, freedom and confidence for the men, women and children of Afghanistan; for courage, vision and generosity within the international community responding to such need; and for tranquillity of mind amongst our own Service community and its wider family.  In the name of Jesus Christ, the peace-giver,  AMEN.  

As we pray for Afghanistan, we ask for wisdom for charitable bodies working there, strength for people feeling under threat and worrying for their futures, and for protection for those who feel forced to leave the country or to move their families to a safer region, for lasting peace and stability.  

We pray for comfort and strength for the family of the Afghan boy who tragically died after falling from a hotel window in Sheffield this week.  Lord, we want all the refugees to be safe and to feel safe in our country.  

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayers.  Amen.  

As we've read and watched the news this week, particularly regarding the situation in Afghanistan, it's easy to fall into a feeling of hopelessness.  And yet, as Christians, we are called to be people of hope, putting our faith in God who is King of kings.  He is ultimately in control of our world and all that happens in it.  It's not easy to get our heads around that or even that He is in control of our lives and what happens to us.  But we can put our hope and faith in Him who is the 'Lord of all hopefulness' as our closing hymn tells us click on the link    

Benediction  

Thank you, Lord, that you are with us, watching over us, through all our days from our waking up to our going to sleep and while we sleep.  Keep us close to you as we go into the rest of our day and week.  
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all.  Amen.